FALL 2008 / Volume 8 - Issue 1
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Photo courtesy of Dr. Ken Cushner. Faculty and students are teaching teachers and creating opportunity in Kenya
BY MELISSA EDLER, ’00, M.A. ’07
ILLUSTRATION BY JASON ZEHNER, ‘04
As I began writing this story, I wondered what a “typical American” might think when he or she hears the word “Africa.” After asking a colleague that same question and hearing her simple reply of “elephants or giraffes,” I questioned whether poverty, AIDS, malaria or ethnic conflict also came to mind. My co-worker replied, “I prefer not to know what is going on in Africa, because it’s out of my control and I have no power to help.” Her response was not surprising, as many Americans likely feel the same way.
“We have a lack of knowledge about severe global issues. We also don’t expose American teachers who, in turn, will teach American children about the lives of Africans and the experience in Africa,” says Dr. Kenneth Cushner, Kent State professor of education and former executive director of international affairs. “The most effective way to get people to communicate with and to teach others is by allowing them to have meaningful, first-hand experiences; then issues become real, and they become connected with real people whom they care about.”
Cushner has direct knowledge that this works: During the past six years, he has made it possible for Kent State faculty and students to become involved in a unique project that improves schools and educational opportunities for hundreds of people living in small Kenyan villages.
is for Africa
The initiative sprang out of a month Cushner spent in Kenya during his first sabbatical from teaching in early 2002. His interest in wildlife took him to the Taita Discovery Centre, a field study hub in the heart of one of Africa’s largest untouched wilderness tracts located between Tsavo East and Tsavo West National Parks, Kenya’s two largest preserves.
The Tsavo region once was home to almost 50,000 elephants during the 1960s and '70s, but their numbers have dwindled to a few thousand as a result of massive poaching and extermination. At the time of Cushner’s initial visit, the elephants were migrating between the two parks on nearly one million acres of land divided into 15 to 20 cattle-raising ranches and a number of small villages. The migration of the elephants and a few hundred lions caused constant conflict with ranchers and villagers. When the meat industry shut down due to high competition and sparse water, many ranchers began leaving the area. The Taita Discovery Centre then began to convert as much of the land a possible into a conservation zone to preserve the migrating elephants.
When Cushner arrived at the centre, his goal was to assist with the centre’s research efforts by studying and photographing elephants to identify and differentiate the animals by trunk size and tusk and ear patterns. But when the rains came, he and his colleagues were forced out of the field, so they went into the local communities and started working with teachers in schools, he says. That is when he saw some real opportunities for Kent State, and thus began the university’s involvement with the elephant conservation project and schools in the region.
In July 2002, Cushner escorted the first group of Kent State faculty and Northeast Ohio teachers to Kenya, and to date, groups of Kent State faculty and students have visited the Mount Kasigau area at least seven times, typically for two to three weeks each trip. They worked primarily in five villages around Mount Kasigau — Rukanga, Kiteghe, Jora, Bungule and Makwasinyi.
ulture and curriculum
Although the primary goal of the project through the Taita Discovery Centre originally was the conservation of elephants, it quickly evolved into much more. “While we were in Kenya as teacher educators building trust among local communities and conservationists, we also began crafting curriculum about the local people and helping to improve their schools,” Cushner says.
Initially, Kent State faculty began offering a series of professional development workshops for village teachers on Saturdays.“The teachers had very limited resources and virtually no professional development opportunities,” Cushner says. Typically, a number of workshops were offered throughout the day; then during the week, Kent State faculty and students would enter the schools either to model what had been discussed during the workshops or to observe and teach the children. On the next Saturday, they would hold a second, follow-up series of workshops. Workshop subjects focused on literacy and science education, administrative skill training, identifying children with special needs, and even alternatives to caning as a form of punishment.
In 2001, Kenya’s government banned the use of caning and all forms of corporal punishment in schools. Many teachers in the Kasigau region asked: “If we can’t cane the children,how will they listen?” Dr. Richard Ambrose, Kent State associate professor of teaching, leadership and curriculum studies, developed a workshop that highlighted relationship and community building within classrooms and focused on both unintended and intended consequences of teacher-child interactions. “Once the teachers learned, through conversations with us, that most places in the United States no longer allowed corporal punishment, they were interested in other forms of discipline,” he says.
“Teachers at the Kasigau schools have the same hopes and expectations of their students as the teachers in Ohio do,” says Will Harper, a 2005 Kent State alumnus who participated in the workshops while earning his bachelor’s degree in secondary education. “Witnessing the different means used to achieve the same goals really helps all parties gain a new perspective and a new respect for one another.”
In addition to offering workshops, Kent State faculty and students also produced a curriculum focused on the local people and their culture, including such topics as education and schooling, major rites of passage, religion, traditional stories, music and dance, food, and local development and enterprise for the Kasigau region. Previously,the Taita people had no written record of their culture. To create the materials, groups of Kent State faculty and students interviewed village elders, some of whom were in their late 80s or early 90s, and captured some of their stories for the first time on video and in writing. One of the interviewees was a Kiteghe shaman, or witch doctor,who shared some of his stories and showed the group some of his dances.“None of his children were interested in learning his skills, so it really is a dying art in the region,” Cushner says. Since that time,the shaman and his wife have passed away.
“The curriculum’s purpose is to teach young people about their own culture and history because there have been tremendous changes with Christianity moving into the region, technologies changing and tourism,” Cushner says. Furthermore, the Kent State team taught the local teachers interviewing and storytelling techniques so they could gather stories and recipes on their own.
In a related project, Dr. Beverly Timmons, Kent State associate professor of teaching, leadership and curriculum studies, and Kent State graduate student Jennifer Ferrell created a set of seven books developed to help primary school children learn about colors, numbers and local culture, using photographs from the area taken by Cushner to illustrate the concepts. “The books were written to support the children’s comprehension and provide a local context for them,” Timmons essays.
conomics of education
Schools in Kenya suffer from more than the lack of professional development for teachers. Classroom and school infrastructures are sparse as well. The few books they have are extremely old and tattered. At least two or three children share a desk. Floors are dirt, walls are bare and there are no windows in the schools.
Each village has one primary school (kindergarten through eighth grade) with anywhere from 150 to 350 children in each school. Each school has one teacher per grade level, regardless of how many children are in the classroom, and all the schools have a shortage of qualified teachers. This shortage is, in part, due to a change in government policy.
Prior to 2002, families throughout Kenya were required to pay for their children to attend primary school. Now, children can go for free, so schools suddenly are filled with thousands of children. However, families still must pay to send their children to secondary school (high school), which costs about $400 per year. “This is a huge expense, considering that average family incomes are around $300 per year in these villages,” Cushner says.
Only 30 to 50 people out of every 500 in the Kasigau area — which has a total population of 12,000 — are gainfully employed. Those who do not have income-earning jobs rely on subsistence living or farming and will trade or barter what little extra they grow. Drought conditions in recent years, however, mean people cannot grow even what they need to eat. In fact, one reason families send their children to school in this region is that schools provide breakfast and lunch daily.
Despite the hardships families in this region face, many positive changes have taken place recently, including construction of two new school expansions and three new libraries. “When I started in 2002,there wasn’t a single library in the community,” Cushner says.
Several of the modifications are due, in part, to the assistance of Kent State faculty and students who, for example, donated a number of the books for the new libraries. They also have donated science equipment and helped to establish a loan system for it at the high school. And they built a small workshop with tools for carpentry, so villages can construct more desks or library shelves when they’re needed.
“We’ve also seen more effective literacy education occurring within the classrooms, as well as teachers feeling more respected and a part of the profession because of the professional development opportunities,” Cushner says.
Another highly important contribution from several Kent State faculty members is monetary support for a half dozen students to attending high school. Cushner and his wife, Hyla, personally have supported two students. One, a 21-year-old named Joseph Kalume from Buguta village, graduated from high school last year and is only the second student from his school to be accepted to a university.
“It’s a huge accomplishment,” Cushner says. “These kids are competing with children from Nairobi and Mombasa who have electricity,computer technology and science equipment available on a regular basis.” Children from the villages he works with have no electricity or running water. A lone generator at the high school provides light in the evenings for the children to study, and each village has a single water tap from the mountain.
Cushner and his wife met Kalume when they visited his high school, Moi, in 2003. “They selected the top student in the list of freshmen to be admitted into school, and I happened to be that student,” Kalume says. “I felt very happy and promised them to work hard so as to achieve my positive-set goals.”
Kalume comes from a family of 13 children. His parents are peasant farmers, and when his father feels well enough, he works in the local mines earning $50 a month. They live on a seven-acre shamba, or farm,and water is a major issue making their subsistence living very difficult. Value says his life would have been miserable,characterized by doing casual jobs or being unemployed, had he not met the American couple. “If Dr. Ken Cushner and his wife had not chosen me, I would never have had the chance for a high school education, and now a university education,” he says.
This year, Value was accepted to the University of Nairobi’'s medical school and is applying for government-sponsored support. Cushner’s family has agreed to pay the $2,000-per-year tuition.“Another option is bringing Joseph to Kent State; he would bring great value to the university,” Cushner says. He is in the process of searching for scholarship support and would provide housing for Value.
Value would love to take pre-medicine courses at Kent State and hopes to become a renowned neurosurgeon in the future. “I would also like to assist a poor child to realize his or her potential through education,” he adds.
Cushner and his wife continue to support Value by giving money to his local primary school, where he has been hired as at teacher’s aide. Value teaches math, science, English and social studies, and receives a monthly salary.
Timmons, who also supported a young Kenyan man through high school in the Mount Kasigau region, says, “We have so much, and the small amount that it takes to provide a student with a high school education has the potential to make a difference in a student’s life and the life of his or her future family.” The young man also was accepted into Kenyatta University recently.
In addition to helping students, Kent State faculty also support Kenyan teachers, most of whom only have two-year degrees, by providing funding for them to attend a university for four-year degrees. The result has been the formation of a new partnership with Kenyatta University in Nairobi, where Kent State co-sponsored a three-day conference on early
literacies in 2004.
rom obligation to opportunity
While many changes occur and growth continues in the Kasigau area,one item that remains the same is the commitment of Kent State faculty and students to the region. Cushner recalls what one of the Kenyan teachers said to him the first time he returned: “You did come back.Most people say they’d love to come back, but you did come back.”
“The educational experience of having a long-term relationship with committed Americans really goes a long way, rather than just passing through as tourists,” Cushner says. “Kenyans are accustomed to seeing van loads of tourists move through, but we’re connecting with people on a much different, deeper level. These long-term relationships are critical.”
Unfortunately, with the current crisis of ethnic conflict in Kenya,a Kent State contingent did not travel to the country this past summer.“But the relationship certainly has not stopped,” Cushner says. He keeps in contact with a few of the teachers and Value through e-mail once a month.
“Africa has long been ignored and forgotten. It is not a big source of income for the United States like China or India might be, but it is critical that we understand the experiences of many people across the planet,” Cushner says. “We have an obligation and responsibility to address those in Africa and understand the continent more effectively.”
Those who believe they cannot make a difference a continent away,or even in their own backyards, need only read about a small project that has made so much impact, thanks to a few determined people who realize they do have the power to help. |
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VIDEO: INTERVIEW WITH KEN CUSHNER
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